Assist First Aid provide First Aid training for businesses in Sussex, Surrey and across the South East

They specialise in delivering flexible, on-site First Aid training to businesses throughout this area, enabling downtime in the business to be kept to a minimum. Smaller businesses such as cafes, pubs and hairdressers can benefit by evening or morning only training, thereby minimising loss of profit due to closure whilst a course is being delivered. Our passion is quite simply providing excellent quality training in both a flexible and affordable manner, by experienced trainers, to as many people as possible.

Heather's Case Study

Heather Kingdon, for 12 years, when asked what her job title was, would recite, ‘senior administrator manager at a manufacturing company’. Yet 3 years ago, Heather decided that her answer would be different. Jumping at the offer of a redundancy package, she took a leap of faith to change the course of her career. It wasn’t a blind leap however, as she had spent some time thinking about what she could do. Her main aim was to do something she loved, enjoyed and that lit the flame inside her, whilst allowing her the flexibility to spend more time with her children, Alex and Natasha.

For the previous 9 years Heather had been volunteering as a community first responder for PART (Partridge Green Area Response Team), attending calls from a cut finger at one end of the spectrum to a cardiac arrest at the other, which coupled with the job of being a trainer for South East Coast Ambulance Service for new responders enabled her to gain a solid background experience in the realm of first aid. Which Heather soon realised was the flame. First aid was something that made Heather passionate, and this made her take the leap of faith which resulted in Assist First Aid being born on the 30th November 2013.

After the idea had been planted, Heather took her teaching qualifications and PTLLS (something I asked her on the spot to explain, with which she grinned and impressively recited, “Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector”) Level 4 certificate thus enabling her to take higher level training qualifications. Heather chose to go the extra mile taking an advanced assessing award as well, to which she reasoned, “I don’t want to be giving my clients an average experience… I as the trainer should be doing everything I possibly can to ensure that learning first aid is as easy and fun as possible”.

Heather’s previous background in jobs has seen her work in two different banks followed by a drastic turnaround in career direction; juggling a credit control job whilst raising two young children and co-setting up a nursery school. For five fantastic years the nursery school thrived, though as her kids grew, she too decided that it was time to grow and searched for something more.

When asked what makes Assist First Aid special and unique, Heather hardly paused for breath: “I think the main difference to my competitors is that I go out to their workplace and can work from 7am – 9pm. I can also split training days to help companies if time constraints are upon them by putting the training over a few different days.”

Heather understands that smaller or medium sized businesses sometimes struggle to accommodate the stricter schedule that national training providers have to stick with, due to dates and venues which aren’t convenient or helpful to their business. By also being far more competitive with pricing, companies can choose to train more people, spreading the responsibility of first aid and avoiding the issues created by holiday, sickness or absence.

Instead of focusing on numbers and statistics and fitting your business into a nice neat box, Heather likes to put the businesses she works with first; understanding their individual needs and trying to make sure that every single person within the business as well as the business as a whole gets what they are looking to achieve. This flexibility, Heather feels, makes her far more unique than her competitors which is a great USP for a business as it puts the clients at the forefront, ensuring their experience is as good as it possibly can be.Even though Assist First Aid is technically still in its infancy at only 2 years old, Heather seems to be an unstoppable force.

Her current project alongside her business is to de-mystify the use of a defibrillator by an untrained individual. Unfortunately (though perhaps understandably) many people think they could do harm by using one of these machines – a myth Heather is determined to crack. She has teamed up with SADS UK (Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome) and is also involved with the Horsham Heart Safe Campaign, which is a local initiative to make Horsham one of the safest places in England should you have a cardiac arrest. This will only be achieved by raising awareness of public access defibrillators and through education to all age groups of CPR, removing the fear of defibrillators and teaching first aid.

Heather believes whole heartedly and passionately that every school should have a defibrillator and is working to this end goal, being motivated further by meeting a lovely gentleman called Rob Underwood at the very first meeting of the Horsham Heart Safe Campaign in early October. Rob has experienced what no parent should have to go through – two of his children have died from Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome in 2010 and 2013. Yet his response to such an awful situation was to ensure that no other parent had to suffer the same. This remarkable man set out on a mission to fund raise for a defibrillator in every school in the Redditch area, which he has successfully done.

Looking to follow in his footsteps, Heather is currently working her way through the list of every school in the Horsham District Area to identify those without a defibrillator in order to rectify the situation. She hopes that once the schools have been identified, fundraising initiatives can commence with, hopefully, local businesses becoming involved and donating for a defibrillator in their area.

Heather’s commitment to this cause seems endless and far reaching; already she has spoken to the British Heart Foundation about manikins for training large groups of children and has also trained children in local youth clubs. Undoubtedly, Heather’s determination will continue to invigorate the local community, her zest will continue to invigorate Assist First Aid’s clients and her passion for ensuring that first aid training is no longer a dreaded chore, but a valuable tool of knowledge, will continue to embolden individuals when faced with emergencies at home, in the workplace and out in public. Heather Kingdon when asked for her job title now proudly recites ‘First Aid Trainer and Owner of Assist First Aid’.

Sussex Pages Case Notes

Heather met Sonny of Sussex Pages via Facebook after seeing an advert for the Prestige XP, a luncheon which Sussex Pages holds once a year to bring together businesses from all over Sussex for a networking lunch and awards presentation. After attending this event Heather approached us to re-develop her website, run her social media campaigns and generally look after the marketing of her business and whilst the website has not been built for SEO, Heather is very happy with her business card website so that people can find her quickly.

We also approached Heather about writing blogs for her website, provoking a startled look and a shudder! However, now she has done a few, she has said that the entire experience of writing blogs has actually taught her a lot. A blog on First Aid Kit Contents, for example, taught Heather the difference between HSE guidelines and BS8599 guidelines - knowledge which she then utilised for giving companies practical and useful advice on a very complicated ‘grey’ area. This learning explosion which comes from Heather’s research for blogs create a ‘butterfly effect’ in which the learning curve seems to just keep going, resulting in better training for first aid, which she is keen to continue.